Addiction
by i AM the Random Idiot
Summary: Oneshot. Rikucentric. You lie awake at night, because you can’t forget...that some needs can never be satisfied. Rated K plus for Xtreme Angst.


**Addiction**

One-shot. Rikucentric. You lie awake at night, because you can't forget...that some needs can never be satisfied.

A/N: Don't ask me why, in the middle of a humor spree, I suddenly stopped and churned this out in about five hours. Maybe there was a huge critical mass of angst building up that needed to be let out before my head spontaneously combusted. Anyhoo, this is my first ever work in second-person POV. Hope it works! No ending author's note, by the way, because it would ruin the mood.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything except a notebook and a pen. So don't make me repeat this stupid disclaimer again. Okay, not quite Shakespearean standards, but hey.

* * *

You lie awake at night. When the sun goes down, and the skies fade from light blue to deep indigo and velvety black, and the tiny pinpricks of stars begin to dust the heavens with spot of pallid brightness, you can no longer go to sleep with the rest of the world like you once did. For a long, long time now, the night has been your time, and it still is no matter what you do, and you have a feeling that it always will be.

You lie awake at night, and try to ignore the echoes of the emptiness in the well of your soul, the void in your heart. During the day, amid the light and warmth and comfort and happiness with your friends and those you love, you can forget that it's even there. But at night, when the dark outside reflects and amplifies the dark in your soul, you lie awake and know that you can never truly forget.

You can never forget how the need for adventure and excitement—something different from the stifling closeness of life on the islands—had driven you from your home—and swept your friends along for the ride. You can never forget how the need to prove to Kairi (and on some level, yourself) that you could beat Sora when it really mattered, how that need had driven you to newer and newer heights of urgency, until all that mattered was _winning_—by any means necessary.

You can never forget your first taste of darkness. You can never forget the **feeling**. It was power. It was excitement. It was _awareness_. It was safety in the knowledge that _nothing_ could hurt you...but it came at a price. It came attached with another need.

You can never forget that hunger. You can never forget how it felt to _win_ over and over, and how you would tell yourself that it was all for _her_, you did it all to save _her_, and at first it _was_, but eventually you were lying to yourself, because it really was for _you_—you and your _need_. While black fire burned in your soul, and black ice coated your heart, and black lightning surged through your veins and muscles and reflexes, you could ignore the black acid that chewed at your mind, infecting you with a need that you will never, ever, be free from for the rest of your life.

You can never forget the betrayal you saw in his eyes when you cut him down with icy venom-tipped words bred from bitterness and anger and fear that he would see you in your state of need for the cold black shadow that kept you from seeing how hollow you'd become—when you left him alone in the ruins with nothing and no one to see how he liked it. You can never forget seeing the smoldering wreckage of what had once been yourself reflected in his eyes, showing you the beast into which your need had transformed you.

You can never forget the emptiness inside yourself. Every time the dark came back to fulfill your need, the high—that feeling of power and excitement and awareness and safety—would eventually leave, and every time it left, it took with it pieces of your soul, leaving more empty spaces that the need wanted filled, and so eventually all the pieces of yourself were gone, and you were nothing but void and ice and hunger and **_need_**. You had become a hollow shell—where there once had been the sparkle of competition and the quiet laughter and the reserved practicality and the love for your friends and all the things that made up the threads of the fabric of yourself, there was only a small frayed knot of dark shadowed anger and fear and cold and naught. The emptiness was there, and it begged to be filled.

You can never forget what it was like to have your body controlled from the inside out. How it felt to be chained in one of the many dark corners of your mind, where no one but you could hear you screaming _(oh-god-makeitstop-idontwantthis-the**dark**-the**cold**-the**need**-it**hurts**-icant-itwont-please-god-letit**stop**letit**stop**letit**stop**-letmeout-letit_**END)** and the cold abyss of your own making echoed back to you your own suffering. Every word you spoke that was not your own felt like shards of glass in your psyche, every move you made that was not your own seared like fire in your joints and the dark shadow that used your shell for you knew this and laughed at your agony.

You can never forget the way your first glimpse of light beyond the door stabbed at your eyes and burned like hellfire into the void of your soul, filling it, but filling it with pain that really comes from you seeing for the first time how far you've fallen from grace. But no matter how much it hurt, it felt somehow right, _wholesome_, something that would test you and make you stronger than the need could ever make you, because it wouldn't be for _you_, the hollow shell of you that barely deserved salvation, but for _them_—the ones that sacrificed so much for you. You couldn't just let yourself die then and make their sacrifices all for nothing. You couldn't do that to them.

You remember how it seemed that that light had lit a fire in the half-dead remnant of your heart that drove back the cold inside you, filled you with purpose, filled you with _something_ rather than _nothing_, and the something was **hope**—and hope never needed anything from you in return.

_**But...**_

But no matter how much of the emptiness was burned off by that light and fire and hope, it couldn't quite kill that now-small, now-tiny, but still-there **need**, the need that even now still watches and waits for you to succumb and start the cycle all over again. Inside yourself, hiding in one of the deepest corners that no light can reach, as you lie awake in the night that is your time, you know it's still there, driving you mad.

You can never forget that need.

The craving is still there, after all that you have done and seen and endured, the burning desire for black fire and black ice and black lightning is still there, still boiling and churning at the back of your mind. The need remains, and you can _never_ forget...

You **will** never forget...

_You're just another addict._


End file.
